One of the greatest things about the fabrication processes is that they can be shrunk. Assuming that your architecture is forward thinking enough, and it navigates issues with power plane mapping and transistor leakage and all that, you can take your design, make it smaller, run it faster and use less power. ATI has reaped great successes going from 65nm to 55nm, and NVIDIA is going the same way with their G92 parts. This process will take their GeForce 8800 GT, an excellent performer at the time of its release, rename it GeForce 9800 GT and reap away. We mean, that would be the way to do it if you wanted to make any sense whatsoever. Because this is a regular old 65nm part. - TechLounge

Zotac GeForce 9800 GT 512MB AMP Graphics Review

This naming debacle, as frustrating as it is, belies some real amazing progress. And we're not talking about the addition of Hybrid SLI to the GeForce 8800 GT, and certainly not 3-way SLI because you can't do it with this excellent card, or any of the other subtle advantages the GeForce 9800 GT has over the GeForce 8800 GT. The progress is this, when the GeForce 8800 GT was released, it cost about three hundred dollars. One year later, games aren't more demanding, but it can be had for close to a Benjamin. But Zotac doesn't stop there, they take a well binned example of G92 prowess and take it one step further.

This card uses the same single slot heatsink NVIDIA's been using all year. It's modified from last year's single slot heatsink with a bigger fan and fan opening for quiet cooling. While it's easy to associate single slot with ineffective, this reference Cooler Master design has been a reliable source of peace and quiet. Now, with a card overclocked like this example we'll see. The heatsink is black, but the PCB is a nice navy blue. All of the design is reference, and the card is nondescript compared with other mainstream cards of the current generation. The sticker's got a dragon on it, certainly to impress any potential buyer.

The performance gap between this GeForce 9800 GT card and an overclocked GeForce 9600 GT is about an order of magnitude, which seeing how the prices overlap, really makes us wonder if there's any room left in the market for the lesser budget card. Really the GeForce 9600 GT maintains undesirable traction, so don't bother with it and get a GeForce 9800 GT. Our game tests have Zotac's AMP! sticking with a GeForce 9800 GTX and even putting a good fight against Sapphire's Radeon 4850 Toxic, all the while consuming less power, making less noise and in general being cheap, which is a great added value for anyone.

This makes the GeForce 9800 GTX appealing only for the 3-way SLI crowd, an unusual demographic at best. Really there's no reason to buy a stock GTX over an overclocked GT such as this, unless you're dead set on spending too much money and using too much power. Zotac includes all the mandated accessories and even throws in a game that we'd never heard of until we benchmarked this card. For any mainstream gamer, the obvious choices have been the Radeon HD 4850 or the GeForce 9800 GTX. Zotac's card simply removes the X, an act we wholeheartedly endorse and really can be in favor to see more.

And a final note to hardware geeks, we've noticed on a lot of hardware forums that people are still recommending the GeForce 8800 GT to one another. The GeForce 9800 GT is based on the same core, but it's on a newer, more efficient process. So if that's the route you're going for, go for the GeForce 9800 GT. For some reason, the GeForce 8800 GT is still selling for about $50 more than the GeForce 9800 GT. It boggles the mind.